Backdrops in Product Photography

Video Transcript

"Okay. I have just brought in a, just a stand. You can use anything. You could do the same thing just by putting your table up against a wall. Just something to give yourself something to hang the fabric from. Bring a second stand in here and let's just bring it up high enough. This is going to be a small, we're going to be focusing on a very small area, so we don't have to make this background very big. And, for the time being, I have a few different colors of cloth to use. And before we make a decision as to what color our background will be, let's check with the product which one of these color backgrounds will be more successful. So, I'm just going to lay it down here. And we've got two different products to shoot. One is blue pearls or black pearls, that's the natural color of these pearls. Isn't that interesting? And this is the blue on blue, which is okay, but it kind of gets lost in there. How does the white on blue look? That looks pretty nice, good contrast, something to think about. I also brought a dark red or a maroon. And the blue against the maroon looks okay, but doesn't do anything for me. It's not very exciting. The white pearls on the red are pretty elegant actually. And then I brought one of my favorite backdrops for product tabletop photography, a piece of black velvet. Now that white stands out beautifully against that. The contrast between the shininess of the pearls themselves and this matte surface is quite stunning. That works pretty well for the red and the blue actually looks very good too. It stands out against that black and makes it brighter and almost lighter. And that's due to something called the law of complementary contrast. The more contrast you can build in, it kind of pops. This dark color makes it relatively look lighter. Look at the difference if we take this dark color and put it against a light background, it goes almost so that it, it almost feels like it's black. But put it against the black and it almost looks light. I think we should go with the black velvet. So let's make our background out of black velvet."